


Soliloquy

by LadyProto



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Gen, Insanity, Isolation, Reflection, angelgard, dunno man it’s naked ardyn angstin in a prison, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-05 16:47:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14048559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyProto/pseuds/LadyProto
Summary: I speak. No one listens.((About a year into his imprisonment, Ardyn’s sanity cracks. Waxes poetic to a rat in Angelgard))





	Soliloquy

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Tumblr user InvisibleDeity for pointing out the little window in Angelgard, and the discord chat for dealing with me in general,

I did nothing wrong, you know.

Yet here I am. Listening to that steady, maddening drip of the brackish water. I’m not certain if the repetition is better or worse than the utter silence I’ve experienced for most of the past forty days . Or as it been four hundred? Oh please, Great Bahamut, allow it to be the later. I cannot keep my eyes focused long enough to read if I have marked into my prison.

Like any proper madman, I’ve attempted to keep marks on the stone walls. To what use though? There is no amount of time after which this confinement will be finished. The desperation of such clawing has caused my fingers to go to bloody bones. Long, pearl-polished fingernails first cracked from malnutrition. Then constant dampness acted next, un-securing the sheets of keratin until they split from gnawed tip to torn cuticles. Curious how my skin doesn’t stop them at all. They just kept peeling back, like one large hangnail, down to knuckles, down to the bone. Like rich fabric shades in the palace that I will once again claim. 

I find myself sucking the dripping copper from my fingers, rocking in place again. Is this the intent? To make me an infant? An unsaved slithering maggot onto which you can pour patronizing niceties? _There there, Ardyn. Shall we play make-believe that your brother wasn’t a jealous bastard?_ I was a King, damned the Hexatheon. Now my kingdom is one of rot. I preside over my court twenty-four hours per day for all of eternity, my broken bones curled into position with my feet buried in my own excrement like the lowly bedded beast that Bahamut has made of me.

The cruelty takes its highest form as a single crack in the rough hewn wall. Have we all fallen into petty taunts? The beam of light cuts through the murky darkness and pelts against my naked flesh. I don't remember the last time I've seen lights, and my skin rejects it, reflecting the light back at them like something unnatural. I'm a mirror: translucent, thin and empty. I'm sharp and painful as if glass. I hiss and recoil, cat and water, acid funneled right through my skull. 

And For what?! For following orders?! I am an innocent man, I assure you. The chosen one. Exulted. Crowds of commoners fanned palm branches at my arrival. Though out of sight, out of mind, is it? Chewed up, spit out, banished from men and forsaken by gods. I envy the rats their freedom to come and laugh as at such a pauper as I. 

But you see, Oh Great Bahamut, this has been your grave mistake. You have made me unbreakable. The delusions have all but left me. I’m wager I’m safer form insanity than the Astral themselves. At least I have never punished a servant for obeying an order. I did nothing wrong. And you’ve left me here, In this pit of despair, hastily thrown together in the fear that I would defy you with the power I’ve claimed. Tower of Babel that I am with my demons. I’m here not from the action of my own hand, but because you’re scared of a the god that I have become. 

This time in solitude has enlightened me. I’m no longer tainted by the dull day-to-day actions that constitute living. Even before I was anointed as healer, I was using most of my mental power to navigate pointless social norms. Such tawdry rules of eye contact, and mannerisms. Why can I not slash the man who spat upon my coat? Are we not just animals? A rat, coming to laugh at the misery of the fallen? An Anak with the guise of a dignity. Living, dying, fighting, fucking -- forever running wild in the garden of Eos? 

You see, this is part of humanity. The Six that claim to have forged mankind from earth and fire, they know this. It’s a human trait. And in my solitude, I’ve learned myself inside and out. I can’t get lost inside this mental maze of mine when I’ve had so much time to study it. Mark my words. I did not go into prison a monster, but surely you will make one of me yet. Men were made in your image after all. 

I did nothing wrong.

I did nothing wrong.

I did nothing wrong.


End file.
